There are some other pictures circulating showing the exterior of the aircraft. It definitely appears something hit the aircraft. There is a skid mark on the frame around the window.[1]
Will be interesting to read if an investigative report is made public.
The TLDW : In the 90s clippy was a symbol of a friendly product feature that wanted to help you do one thing (but you could opt out). Clippy wasn't stealing your data, serving you ads, or anything malicious, it just wanted to help you do one specific thing (e.g. write a letter). The clippy movement is about sending a message to big tech that we don't appreciate ads in our start menu, having our data scraped and sold, being forced into dark patterns, having AI try to take jobs and/or destroy industry, blatant theft of work, etc. Basically, "make computers friendly again".
Yeah, Clippy was one of the early examples of infantilization and annoying anthromorphization in software, no better than the "cutesy" error messages or engagement popups that plague us today. It should be an example of what not to do but I guess nostalgia is a powerful drug.
Despite the "internetedness" of this, it's a pretty concise summary.
I'm actually really proud of these kids for doing this. It probably won't amount to much, but they're increasingly conscious of and vocal about the problems caused by Big Tech.
...tldw? Seriously. Or could you timestamp it? I can't find attentionmaxxed flicks as attention grabbing. It fills up my attention receptors and my brain marks them as done literally 1-2 seconds in with generated mental summaries.
We used to hate Clippy because he felt intrusive. Now AI is much more deliberately intrusive and every service mines your data. Clippy doesn't seem so bad in comparison. Hence, nostalgia mixed with a form of protest against the AI tech space.
Seriously, watch at least half of Louis Rossman's video in the GGGP post. It's worth the 2 minutes at 2x speed it'll take (4mins at 1x speed). You won't get the spirit of the thing quite the same if you don't hear him explain it.
It's a signal of disgust and rebellion against modern evil that companies do — they abuse attention, data-mine, etc. The clippy mascot represents something that, in contrast, may have been dumb and annoying, but was not actively evil. "Clippy just wanted to help."
I can't think of a lower-effort or less beneficial social rebellion, and on top of that the messaging is totally confused and half of the people that encounter it will need it explained to them.
it'll just be purposefully misinterpreted on the corporate level and Microsoft will roll out a clippy that does abuse the user to ride the momentum.
That is stage one which is building the movement. The current action being taken is a campaign of contacting the AE and governors to get them to deny the contract for AI tracking cameras. Louis is one of the few people that actually give actionable steps
Rossmann is the first to admit that Clippy pfps do nothing if the person stops their activism after that one gesture. A 5 second pfp change to spark a conversation (the one we're having, for example) is pretty decent ROI.
Profile picture are literally a meme for performative activism, not something that achieves anything at all. All it does is signal to those that already think alike that you are part of the pack and everyone else will just roll their eyes.
You watched the youtube short? Do you know who Rossmann is? He wasn't in the youtube short. That should've been a hint. GGGP = great-great-grandparent = 4 levels up; the short was 2 levels up.
A dog whistle is intended to be only recognized by those who are intended to "hear" it - like how an actual dog whistle appears almost entirely silent to humans but can be heard by dogs. It exists to signal alignment to those "in the know" while providing plausible deniability that can be used to paint anyone pointing it out as a conspiracy theorist. A lot of far-right/neo-nazi 4chan/8kun memes fall into this category: the "OK" hand sign, the use of Pepe the frog (although that one quickly saw wider adoption making it too ambiguous for signalling purposes), even simply the concept of drinking milk, but also of course "number codes" like 14, 88 or 13/50. These don't have to have an inherent/original meaning as they're often more effective if they're sufficiently obscure/rare but have pre-existing unrelated meaning. Clearly Clippy is not a dog whistle then: although it references a pre-existing thing, there's no semantic ambiguity nor any attempt to hide or deny its meaning. The intent is to get people curious, find out its meaning and adopt it if they agree with it.
Cult symbols are also usually meant to be easily obscured and meaningless to the uninitiated. They're also often used as a form of communication but otherwise usually behave similarly to dog whistles. Unlike the dog whistles I mentioned they usually have no prior meaning (unless they're adopted from pre-existing occult/religious symbolism) and primarily profess shared mantras/beliefs. Some more widely known examples can als be found in Christianity: the crucifix symbolizes the professed belief that Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross as a human and rose from the dead as the Son of God, the "Jesus fish" (ICHTHYS) symbol represents a bunch of ideas in addition to being derived from an abbreviation of the professed belief in Jesus as the Son of God and Savior - the latter is widely claimed to originate very much in a "cult symbol" by allowing Christians to identify each other in a way not obvious to outsiders during times in which they were facing religious suppression. If there is a mantra in Clippy, it's "Clippy never hurt anyone" and that seems a bit too self-referential - plus as I said "followers" will happily explain this meaning to you.
A sibling suggest "virtue signal" and I guess that's a better fit but only through the semantic erosion the term has experienced as part of the US conservative culture war on "wokeness" (a term that suffers from the same problem).
I'd say the French flag profile pictures following the ISIS attacks in France or the rainbow colors adopted by various corporations on social media for Pride Month pre-Trump were a better example for virtue signals. Clippy seems a lot more confined and specific to really fit in the same bucket. The French flag really just expressed some vague notion of "solidarity", the rainbow colors in corporate imagery just vaguely expressed support for "diversity". So they literally exist to signal virtues - vague "support" for a concept generally understood to be positive - nothing concrete. Clippy on the other hand seems to specifically represent opposition to specific common business practices in the (US especially and AI in particular) tech industry.
Watermarks usually have branding to indicate ownership. Two distinct 3D paperclip overlays don't seem like watermarks and JonNYC doesn't use them in all photos he's posted on his thread on Bluesky.
A lot doesn't add up from that article though. The writer mentions the window in question is the Captain's window. From the pictures, it appears to be the First Officer's window. Also, the writer mentions pock marks consistent with hail damage in other areas of the aircraft but I haven't found any images substantiating that.
Hail is absolutely the most probably explanation, the article points to two other instances with similar outcomes. I think the doubt comes from the lack of evidence of hail or convective activity or other hail damage on the aircraft. Also, the pilot reportedly said he saw something coming at the aircraft.
Most journalists are pretty bad when it comes to covering aviation so I wouldn’t put much weight on the discrepancies. Half the time they can’t tell the difference between a jet and a Cessna 172. Seriously.
Indeed. As an engineer I ask an expert to review anything technical that I write (or program) for accuracy where I'm not an expert, but for some reason journalists don't do this. And so here we are.
> ...but for some reason journalists don't do this.
I imagine most journalists would love to have technical reviewers on their work, but there's no funding for it and there's pressure to churn content as quickly as possible. The specialized editors and fact checkers have been stripped away in the last few decades to create lean content mills.
>I imagine most journalists would love to have technical reviewers on their work, but there's no funding for it and there's pressure to churn content as quickly as possible.
well, so, we call these people what they are : tabloid writers.
journalists are the ones that take the time, effort, and cost to verify claims and rebroadcast perceived truths.
This is a bit of a "no true Scotsman" issue. Almost no one working as a journalist is given the resources to do that. Even if they have access to those resources, they don't necessarily have access to them for every story. And how are you supposed to become a senior journalist who has developed sources and gained enough trust/reputation to have resources invested in them - without being a junior journalist who is only given the leftover scraps?
A journalist deprived of resources might regress to what you call a tabloid writer, sure. But my issue is with framing it as a moral failing on their part, that they're too lazy or stupid or arrogant to get the facts right. Surely there are people like that, but it isn't most of them. This is a systemic issue. As a society we have failed to fund these activities.
Hail can be found higher than cruising altitude. Remember, it forms by riding updrafts in large storm clouds. Those updrafts don't stop blowing based on what's going on with the hail.
That said, I really doubt this was hail. The pilot is said to have seen something coming, which is probably why they are focused on a weather balloon payload now.
Instead of complaining about individual sites, learn to use your browser more effectively. They can all zoom in on things, and any good one will let you set a minimum font size. Set that to the smallest size that you can easily read and instantly no website anywhere will ever have text that is too small to read.
No, not generally. 99% of all webpages you visit will be perfectly fine. At most you might notice some misalignment between graphical and text elements on the page, but most pages don’t rely on that for anything important.
In this case, it should be easy to detect genetic or biological material if it was a meat sack strike & rule out space debris. They don’t tend to do well when hit at several hundred mph.
The only other thing really up that high would be space debris, weather balloon payload (the balloon itself is very thin and soft), or maybe a sounding rocket (but don’t these come with NOTAMs?).
180 mph taken from a bit of googling, ballpark figure on upper end.
So this was really immediately after takeoff. My understanding of commercial airliners is they usually fly fairly parallel with the ground just after takeoff to pick up speed before ascending, so I would guess they hadn’t much altitude at all.
Anyway it’s a very interesting article, ty to poster! And it was an interesting question to think about.
AFAIK (what is not much on the military side), fighters are all optimized for performance, and not resilience. And fighters that work on improving the crew options focus on survivability instead of resilience because it tends to weight less.
It's more like if you make a plane resilient to bird strikes, you sacrifice a good chunk of performance - envelope, maneuverability, something.
Depending on how fast the plane is going, "good chunk" might be a hilarious understatement too. Hitting an object at 1000mph imparts 4x the damage compared to hitting an object at 500mph.
If you want to see an example of a durable military aircraft, look at the A-10:
Anyways, that's a military plane designed to get hit by... stuff... and as a result can take bird strikes. But its max speed is like 400mph and it would get absolutely wrecked by any serious opposition from fighters. The more resilient you make a plane to birds, the more vulnerable it is to missiles, per unit price. And missiles is kinda the point of the whole endeavor.
I heard that the Navy (historically, at least--don't know about today) placed a greater value than the Air Force on engine redundancy. Hence why we have both the twin engine F-18 (Navy) and the single engine F-16 (Air Force), even though functionally there's a lot of overlap between the two.
Sure, but then you also have the F22, F117, B2, A10, SR71, U2, and a bunch more I can’t think of right now.
Some helicopters have a single engine. Most have 2. They are still unreliable death machines, and arguably 2 engines makes the problem a bit worse (more moving parts). They are (sometimes) more tolerant of a single engine out, of course. But transmissions are often the weak spot with helicopters.
Single vs Dual has many factors, not just reliability.
A single engine failure on a SR71 (if I remember correctly) resulted in a airframe loss and ejection at relatively low speeds, and one at full speed would likely result in a complete crew loss on top of it - and it has dual engines. Think catastrophic near instant destruction.
Sometimes you just need more power than a single engine (with current tech) can provide in the space you have available, for instance.
Sometimes, like an A10, you really do want something that can take a massive beating and keep going.
A B52 can lose 2 engines with no issues, and theoretically up to 4 and still be controllable (depending on the distribution of the lost engines). But that isn’t because it needs reliability, but because it’s got 8 engines because it was designed to carry a metric shit ton of explosives, and it only had 60’s era tech jet engines.
Modern jets usually use 2 (much more powerful) engines for similar or even larger payloads.
Plenty. They're far simpler to fly than multi-engine planes, but they don't have the redundancy or power needed for e.g. airliner purposes. For example FedEx operates a fleet of over 200 single engine turboprops (Cessna 208). Pilatus built about 2,000 PC-12s in the 35 years since it was introduced.
They're designed around not getting hit at all, rather than being able to take hits. Stealth, stand-off weapons, sensor fusion and information displays all so the plane never gets put in a position to be hit.
That's not to say they don't defend in depth, one reason twin engine fighters are desired is because of engine redundancy after all, but a more "armored" plain is a slower, bulkier, easier to detect and easier to hit target. And you'll still likely get taken down in one hit.
And there's still not a lot you can do if your engine swallows a bird or two, especially if you only have one.
The military also has the expectation that not everyone is going to come home, unlike a civilian airliner where the safety margins are much wider.
That might be technically true, but the F35 and F16 are both single engine aircraft and IIRC constitute the bulk of at least the US air force’s combat aircraft.
B2, F117, B52, P9, F22, F14, F18, C130, C17, C5, CH47, AH-64, SR71, U2, A10, and on and on just to give some recent examples.
There are a few single engine aircraft roles (including the F104), but they are not and have never been the bulk of active serving aircraft. It isn’t just ‘technically’ true.
Be that as it may, the workhorse combat aircraft of most NATO air forces and the USAF itself is the F-16, a single-engine fighter, and its nominal replacement, the F-35 is also single engine. You can try to make your point by comparing those vs the numbers of F-15s, F/A-18s, F-Fs, Rafales, Eurofighters and so on in service vs the F-16 and F-35, but bringing C130s and C17s into it is irrelevant, those are not "combat aircraft".
edit: ah but they are "military aircraft", sure. fine.
Earlier reports suggested it could have been something from space but that seems unlikely since the velocity of anything that survived reentry would likely have caused substantial damage beyond a cracked windshield. The theory was likely amplified by the captain of the flight who reportedly described the object that hit the plane as “space debris.”
The claim that the captain said it was "space debris" was from a reddit comment from the allegedly neighbor of a flight attendant that was on the flight. Not the most credible of sources.
Here’s what appears to be the prior version from archive.ph, which does align more with the submitted hed:
Authorities are now considering whether a falling object, possibly from space, caused damage to the windshield and frame on a United 737 MAX over Colorado on Thursday. Various reports that include watermarked photos of the damage suggest the plane was struck by a falling object not long after taking off from Denver for Los Angeles. One of the photos shows a pilot’s arm peppered with small cuts and scratches. In his remarks after the incident, the captain reportedly described the object that hit the plane as “space debris,” which would suggest it was from a rocket or satellite or some other human-made object. Some reports say it was possibly a meteorite.
Whatever hit the plane, it was an enormously rare event and likely the first time it’s ever happened. The plane diverted without incident to Salt Lake City where the approximately 130 passengers were put on another plane to finish the last half of the 90-minute flight. Apparently only one layer of the windshield was damaged, and there was no depressurization. The crew descended from 36,000 feet to 26,000 feet for the diversion, likely to ease the pressure differential on the remaining layers of windshield. Neither the airline nor FAA have commented.
> Apparently only one layer of the windshield was damaged
How does that square with the picture of the pilot’s arm with tiny cuts? Did the space debris only damage the internal layer? Something is not adding up to me here.
It’s mentioned in the books, kopeng. I think it comes up in some of the repair scenes, but there’s such a jargon dump in many of them that it might slip by. Naomi is caressing some of it at one point, like she’s petting a cat. Which is not far off from how she sees the Roci.
I can think of two in the show, but one is right before Holden needs to tell Nagata something important, and the other is in the middle of a brain dump at Tycho station when the Roci is being diagnosed for repairs.
But the coloration in the window sure suggests spalling. I’m surprised the tempered glass did that much damage. That takes a lot of velocity. Which is probably why they aren’t thinking bird.
I suspect the cuts on the pilot's arm are from BEFORE the incident. The blood looks a pretty dried up and the yellowish streaks look like some kind of antiseptic ointment was applied. The oval shaped wound closest to the camera looks like it's been healing. Could be wrong though.
Now I'm just imagining the object hitting the window, the pilot looking down at his arm injury from the bowl of petunias that hit the plane yesterday, and thinking "not again."
Making sure the plane continues to fly would be the top priority for a pilot. Second to that, formulating an emergency plan and communicating with air traffic control. Taking pictures of you wounds should be extremely far down the list
Why would there be a picture of the arm circulating if the injuries are from another incident? I won’t dispute your analysis of the photo because I don’t know anything about the subject
None of the articles I have seen have said the lacerations are a result of the "space debris" incident. The linked article simply says "One of the photos shows a pilot’s arm peppered with small cuts and scratches", and which is not the same as "the pilot said the shattering glass caused the cuts you see on his arm."
I am saying it is possible that the pilot had a previous, unrelated injury, and it just so happened to be captured in the picture of the windshield. That picture is going viral because it was likely one of the first pics from the incident, but it does not mean his injuries are necessarily from the incident. I was only pointing this out based on the way the blood looked more dried up and treated/healing.
Not saying it's what's happened here, but it's very easy for someone to post any image and claim it's from the same incident. Get the post enough attention and if it seems genuine enough other people will share and repost without fact checking, then people will share and reposts the reposts, and so on.
Professional outlets do this all the time, and they're _paid_ not to mess this up. Copying other outlet's bad reporting without fact checking, then once a couple more "corroborating" articles come up (or one from a reputable outlet) and it'll just be repeated as fact, they can't all be wrong right?
It seems like the article has been updated: "Sources told AVweb Sunday that the focus of the investigation is on a weather balloon payload." This is far more likely than a meteor.
Space is big, but the upper atmosphere is pretty big, too!
I understand that there are a lot of planes and they cover a lot of miles, and there are a lot of weather balloons too... but each windshield is merely tracing a 40cm high by 150cm wide rectangle across an entire country, through an airspace 12km tall covering 10 million square kilometers.
My son brings his glove when we go to a game for the local minor league baseball team in case of a foul ball or home run, we've spent a couple dozen hours in seats near enough to the action to give it a chance...but that glove has not yet intersected with the path of a baseball in an environment that's significantly more target-dense.
What's the probability that the path of a plane windshield randomly intersects with a weather balloon payload? I would have said it's negligible, but apparently not!
The article itself says the object was probably a weather balloon, not space debris, and the title of the article is now "United MAX Hit by Falling Object at 36,000 Feet".
There should be small pieces of whatever they hit embedded in the body & glass of the aircraft. As long as they are analyzed, the cause of this won't remain a mystery forever.
My first thought was that this is more likely to be a spontaneous failure of the windshield glass under pressure, due to manufacturing flaw or improper maintenance. Things like that have certainly happened before. But then again, it seems weird that glass fragments would be projected inward in that scenario.
Plugging in 35k ft altitude, and 775 ft/s velocity here (https://www.spaceworks.aero/fcc2/index.html) gives dynamic pressure of 220 lb/ft2, vs ~2100 lb/ft2 for 1atm at sea level (the same calculator says 7k ft altitude has a static pressure of ~1600 lb/ft2, or rough idea of cabin air pressure).
At that height if windows are damaged enough to hurt captain or pilot, would the flight lose balance because of air coming in? How did they land in that situation? There is no mention of that in the article.
The laminated glass did not fully break. It appears only the inner layer shattered, and cabin pressure was not lost.
It has happened before that cockpit windows have failed at altitude resulting in explosive decompression, and the plane still landed successfully. For example, British Airways Flight 5390:
The airplane shouldn't be affected much by a blown out window. However, the blast in the captain's face might make it very difficult for him to see or even breath. If he could get his oxygen mask on, which I think has goggles, he should be ok.
i remember i had a plane flight that was horrendously delayed once, and then finally when we hop on board they make an announcement about it being a 737 Max and I laughed, thinking they were joking...
"Something from “space” may have just struck a United Airlines flight over Utah" "“NTSB gathering radar, weather, flight recorder data.”": https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-m... (arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-may-have-just-struck-a-united-airlines-flight-over-utah/)
My first guess would a bird. Bird strikes happen all the time; there are billions of birds. Next guess would be a drone; there are a lot more drones flying around than spacecraft.
Unlikely to be either it's too high. Drones that can fly that high are typically the size of a small aircraft. And there are no bird bits stuck to the plane, no blood either.
It could be parts of a weather balloon, or small meteor fragments, or even something that came off another plane flying slightly higher, but that would probably have been discovered already. Could be space debris as well, more likely if there was a launch around the same time.
It was higher than any bird reasonably found in that area normally flies. The plane was over twice the altitude that any bird there should be able to reach on its own. The birds that normally can fly higher than that are as far as I know not found in North America.
However, that area does get thunderstorms that can catch birds and tremendously boost their altitudes to 45-60k feet. The bird would almost certainly die on the way up and maybe also freeze, but that might make it more dangerous if it hits a plane on the way back down.
I don't know if there were any storms that day close enough to make such a strike possible in this case.
Ruppell’s Griffon Vulture is the only bird clocked that high, but my understanding is that we’ve been moving estimates higher for a bunch of birds over the last couple of decades. Absence of proof and proof of absence and so forth. I think people have been paying more attention.
That vulture looks like a big boy too. So not impossible.
Edit: this bird is South American, adapted to the Andes, which is a bit of a hike to Colorado.
There are more drones up there than falling rocks. There are probably more classified drones up there than falling rocket parts. I suspect this aircraft collided with something far more terrestrial. Something with its transponder off. Any chinese balloons over denver at the moment?
If this is indeed man made space debris, who is responsible under current international rules? If it were to collide with a civilian aircraft and cause an air crash in the future, would there be an embarrassing situation where the culprit could not be found?
Isn't the speed of descent of objects falling out of orbit so great they usually burn up before hitting the ground, and wouldn't that speed cause them to easily penetrate into the interior of the plane?
If an object survives reentry far enough to be at airliner altitudes, it will have significantly slowed down already and probably be falling at or near terminal velocity. Of course it depends on the shape and density of the object.
> Whatever hit the plane, it was an enormously rare event and possibly the first time anything has collided with an aircraft at that altitude other than a projectile launched with that intended purpose.
There it goes the big sky theory once again, someone let the guy know there were six mid air collisions this year alone.
A 50 cal bullet is estimated to reach 15,000 feet if fired straight up.
But this is Colorado: in the most extreme scenario, standing atop Mount Elbert, you’re already at ~15,000 feet.
Combine these two — and account for the dramatically reduced air resistance along the bullet’s path starting from high altitidue — you could conceivably get a bullet that high
Some dope standing at high elevation blasting bullets into the sky in Colorado seems as plausible as a meteor
Anyone else think about that Asimov robot story with the "intuitive" robot "Jane"? She had discovered which stars were most likely to have planets around them with the right conditions for life and was flying back on an airplane with her human handler when it was hit by a meteorite.
So normally your wounds don’t scab over instantaneously, what is the real story here? Obviously the majority of satellites are actually balloons/sataloons.
This conspiracy theory mindset is so interesting. How looking at that potato quality low-definition picture and thinking "they must be hiding the truth" and not "I am probably not getting a 100% accurate look at those wounds from this garbage image".
Much higher than a few decades back, but still effectively zero. Even after putting up X thousands of satellites up into orbit, they still physically cover a tiny total surface area. And the same goes for planes. So two of these colliding would be a monumental freak accident, which is why I'm still assuming it's not space debris until more information shows up.
We are nearly at the peak of the annual Orionid meteor shower. [0] There should be a higher probability of encountering meteor debris during this period than during periods where there are no meteor showers in progress. We are passing through the debris from Halley's Comet right now and for about another two weeks.
His arm is covered in sharpnel wounds from the windshield being shattered due to the energy of impact. That is how sharpnel wounds look like. There's a good chance he went to the hospital later to get the glass pulled out of his arm.
If this did happen to be space debris as a result of human activity then the likelihood that this becomes a more common occurrence is likely seeing how Kuiper and Starlink are looking to have somewhere around 42,000 satellites and it currently has around 8,000; Kuiper also has similar ambitions.
Even with that the odds of this have to be less likely than winning the lottery while getting bit by a shark that was simultaneously struck by lightning.
Will be interesting to read if an investigative report is made public.
[1]https://viewfromthewing.com/new-cockpit-photos-may-show-what...